Your baby will always take enough food to satisfy her needs. If she doesn’t want to eat, then she doesn’t need to. This means that there will be days when she will eat hardly anything, but these will be followed by periods of eating a lot.
To eat a balanced diet, your baby should take in foods from all the different food groups in the correct proportions. This doesn’t have to be on a daily basis, though, so when you are considering whether she is eating well, you need to think in the long term: look at what she has eaten in the last week, not just today. Viewed like this, a binge of eating nothing but bread for two days in nothing to worry about, as your baby will probably take in enough fruit and vegetables during the week to balance this out. What is important is that she should be given a wide variety of foods to choose from: she can’t eat the foods she requires if they are not made available to her.
Your baby will gradually come to eat many of the same foods as you, prepared in a form that she can manage. It would be wrong, however, to support that her needs are the same as yours or that a diet that is recommended as healthy for you will be good for her. You may aim to reduce your fat intake by using low-fat versions of dairy products, for example, but you should give your child whole milk until she is two years old; after that you can introduce low-fat milk if you wish. The benefits to health of limiting sugar intake, though, apply just as much to babies as to adults. You should never add any salt to your baby’s food.
Your baby will always take enough food to satisfy her needs. If she doesn’t want to eat, then she doesn’t need to. This means that there will be days when she will eat hardly anything, but these will be followed by periods of eating a lot.
To eat a balanced diet, your baby should take in foods from all the different food groups in the correct proportions. This doesn’t have to be on a daily basis, though, so when you are considering whether she is eating well, you need to think in the long term: look at what she has eaten in the last week, not just today. Viewed like this, a binge of eating nothing but bread for two days in nothing to worry about, as your baby will probably take in enough fruit and vegetables during the week to balance this out. What is important is that she should be given a wide variety of foods to choose from: she can’t eat the foods she requires if they are not made available to her.
Your baby will gradually come to eat many of the same foods as you, prepared in a form that she can manage. It would be wrong, however, to support that her needs are the same as yours or that a diet that is recommended as healthy for you will be good for her. You may aim to reduce your fat intake by using low-fat versions of dairy products, for example, but you should give your child whole milk until she is two years old; after that you can introduce low-fat milk if you wish. The benefits to health of limiting sugar intake, though, apply just as much to babies as to adults. You should never add any salt to your baby’s food.
